The next day, Raz and Sasha prepared for their mental journey. This time, at his mentor's insistence, Raz had eaten breakfast despite his lack of appetite. Now he stood in front of the brain tumbler, awaiting instructions.
"When you are ready, enter your mental world. I have received clearance to enter your mind using a psycho-portal and assist you in your battle." Sasha held up the small door.
"I thought psycho-portals don't work on people under eighteen," Raz said.
"Indeed, they typically don't. But as you are an official Psychonaut, I am able to override that restriction through your ThinkerPrint. With your consent, of course."
Raz nodded, took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then released it in a sigh as he pulled down his goggles. The brain tumbler roared to life, and a few minutes later, the telepathic signal came.
«Ready, Agent Nein.»
Sasha carefully placed the psycho-portal, opened it, and projected himself into Razputin's mental world.
Immediately his senses were assaulted by the winter storm that ravaged the poor boy's mind: screaming wind in his ears, stinging cold biting his skin even through his clothes, blinding snow shining in the moonlight despite his shades. As far as the eye could see, ice and snow blanketed the mental world in monochromatic numbness and deathly chill, bogging down any attempt to trudge through it.
It came up to his knees – difficult for Sasha, entirely impassable for Razputin, who stood, shivering, beside him in a small circular clearing he'd melted with pyrokinesis. It wouldn't last long, as the falling snow was already starting to fill it in again.
Sasha floated straight up a few feet and shook the snow off his shoes with a frown. "Interesting."
"It's worse than it was last time," Raz told him, his voice almost lost under the howling wind. "It wasn't actively snowing before, and it's even deeper now. That's going to make it a lot harder to get to Melancholia."
"Yes, we will have to levitate to traverse this snow."
Razputin nodded, but struggled to conjure a levitation ball. No sooner had he managed to lift himself above the snow than a "no" symbol knocked him right back off, accompanied by a Censor's matching shout. Raz fell face-first into the snow, leaving a perfect boy-shaped pit.
Agent Nein turned to face the source of the attack, and found the Censor unimpeded by the snow, walking atop it as if wearing snowshoes, despite the heavy black armor weighing it down. His first instinct was to attack, and his hands flew to a psychic battle stance, but there he paused. He observed as more Censors appeared, staying his psi-blasts to first see what they did.
Strangely, they seemed to ignore him in favor of attacking Raz (who, to his credit, was doing a fine job of fending them off despite being up to his neck in snow). It was only when Sasha fired a psi-blast at one of them that they turned on him as well.
The Psychonauts made quick work of these attackers, leaving Sasha with a perplexed frown. "That should not have happened," he observed. "I am the foreign presence here, yet your Censors seemed entirely uninterested in me until I began assisting you."
"Yeah," Raz said bitterly, "they work for Melancholia now. I bet she doesn't want me levitating so it's harder to get to her." Furrowing his brow and putting a hand to his chin, he added, "Actually, she's been weirdly quiet so far."
"Get over yourself, whelp," came that awful, familiar voice. "Not everything you do is worthy of commentary."
"Ah, there she is!" Raz smiled, but it was forced.
Sasha manifested a mental cigarette and puffed on it thoughtfully. "Interesting. And your Censors now… 'work for her,' you say?"
"He was too pathetic to maintain control of them," Melancholia explained, and though they could not currently see her, they could practically hear the cruel smile in her voice. "Some Psychonaut he is, losing control of his own Censors!"
"Indeed?" Sasha asked, raising an eyebrow. "I would be quite interested to hear what you have to say about me, considering that I, too, have lost control of my Censors in the recent past."
Raz perked up somewhat at that. It was a fair point: Agent Nein could hardly be considered a bad Psychonaut, and even if the Censor overflow had been planned, the Mega-Censor had not.
The dragon, on the other hand, sputtered for a moment, then growled in frustration. Sasha just took a drag off the cigarette, the faintest hint of a smug smile tugging ever-so-slightly at the corner of his mouth.
"It matters not," Melancholia snarled. "Let your idol bring you false hope! It will make your despair all the sweeter when I crush it!"
Once again, she summoned Doubts from beneath the snow. Raz hopped onto a levitation ball without hesitation and began focusing his pyrokinesis. Judging by the look on his face, Sasha's intervention in his mind was already bolstering his spirits.
"Ha! I've already fought plenty of these, and I've got backup now!" he said, deftly weaving about on his thought bubble as he fired psi-blasts at the burning Doubts.
"That is correct," Sasha affirmed, backing Raz with psi-blasts of his own, without moving from where he hovered above the snow.
The wind whirled around them, kicking snow into a vicious blizzard, penning them in at the eye of the freezing cyclone. And on that howling gale rode the dragon's furious voice. "Backup? Is that what you call it? Running crying to Agent Nein for help because you're too weak and cowardly to stand against my might on your own? Because you're afraid I'll slit your pitiful throat again with barely a flick of my claw!"
Judges began to march into sight from somewhere beyond the relentless veil of snow, wearing the black hoods of medieval executioners and wielding axes instead of gavels.
"You think he will be able to save you?" Melancholia continued. "He cannot! You will see – I will put the both of you in your place myself! I will show you the true meaning of despair!"
A pair of Panic Attacks blinked into existence, their bright flashing colors painful against the moonlit snow. They threw back their skeletal heads and howled like deranged wolves as a vast, dark shape approached through the blizzard. She burst from the wall of the storm on broad leathery wings; with a single beat of those wings that rivaled the force of the gale around them she braked in midair and dropped to the ground with a booming thud that shook the ground.
Melancholia took a deep breath, and then let out a mighty roar so loud that both Psychonauts clapped their hands over their ears.
Sasha shuddered and shook his head as if to clear out the awful echo still ringing in his brain. "Razputin! You must fight off her minions! I will focus my efforts on the dragon!"
"Roger that, Agent Nein!" Raz called out as he telekinetically yanked away the axe of a Judge just as it took a swing at Sasha. He whirled around and threw the axe at one of the Panic Attacks, which teleported out of the way.
Melancholia lunged, powerful jaws longer than Sasha was tall snapping shut where he had been but a moment before; he levitated out of her way and retaliated with a psi-blast straight to her eye. Reeling back, she shrieked in fury and pain, before shaking her head and swiping at him with her claw. Sasha levitated straight up to evade her, sending another volley of psi-blasts.
A Panic Attack's flaming skulls slammed into him, breaking his focus. He glanced over to see Raz catch it in a time bubble and subject it to a chain of psi-punches, only to be set upon by several Doubts.
This momentary lapse in focus was all it took; Sasha turned his gaze back to the dragon as she loomed above him, her mouth wide open as she took in a deep breath. He did not have time to move, only to throw a psychic shield up around himself just as a blast of frost washed over him. Though it did not touch him, it built up into a crystalline mass on the shield, encasing him in a thick, translucent globe of ice.
Just as he was about to psi-blast his way out, he saw Melancholia rearing up, talons of one claw spread wide, and he knew what was coming. Sasha cracked open his capsule of smelling salts and vanished from the mindscape as that massive claw hurtled toward his icy prison.
The dragon turned her attention to Raz and snarled, "See how quickly your allies abandon y—"
But Raz was yanked out of his mental world before she could finish, and found himself in the lab, blinking at Sasha, who was holding smelling salts under his nose.
"The situation," he stated, "is more dire than I had realized."